Ability to customize recipes in Calibre GUI?

[t3d]

This is actually a feature request addressed to Kovid

I think that it would be great to have the ability to allow the users to choose their preferences regarding fetching feeds from calibre GUI.
The simple thing would be to optionally expose variables like

max_articles_per_feed

and

oldest_article

BTW, couldn't the oldest_article be binded to downloading schedule, so that user would get only content that was not downloaded previously?

And the completely awesome thing would be if the user could choose feeds he likes to have downloaded from amongst the feeds supported in recipe. This would save time, disk space and bandwidth.
I find it rather common situation when there are pages having bundle of feeds related to given geographic locations, different people's blog entries, and so on, and the reader is interested in content of few (or even one) feeds out of many.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by t3d

This is actually a feature request addressed to Kovid

Enhancement requests (and bugs) go here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre
Of course discussions of the desirability of such enhancements go here

I think that it would be great to have the ability to allow the users to choose their preferences regarding fetching feeds from calibre GUI.
The simple thing would be to optionally expose variables like

max_articles_per_feed

and

oldest_article

It's been my experience that feeds vary too widely for global settings to be very useful.

BTW, couldn't the oldest_article be binded to downloading schedule, so that user would get only content that was not downloaded previously?

Read the sticky code thread and search here for some options for this and some of the problems with this.

And the completely awesome thing would be if the user could choose feeds he likes to have downloaded from amongst the feeds supported in recipe. This would save time, disk space and bandwidth.

This is easy to do - just add or delete any feeds you like from the recipe.

[t3d]

Originally Posted by Starson17

It's been my experience that feeds vary too widely for global settings to be very useful.

But my idea was to optionally expose these variable on a "per recipe" basis, next to scheduling preferences.

Originally Posted by Starson17

This is easy to do - just add or delete any feeds you like from the recipe.

Of course it is easy, both for me and you, as we do create and fix recipes for calibre, but it is almost like rocket science for people not used to programming. And even for experienced people, it would be just a lot easier to be able to tune recipe with a list of checkboxes, than either
a) have recipe duplicated, altered by hand and stored in "custom" section
or
b) locate the zipped recipe bundle, unpack it, fix the recipe, and compress it back

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by t3d

my idea was to optionally expose these variable on a "per recipe" basis, next to scheduling preferences.

That's better than global, but of course we have this control now.

Of course it is easy, both for me and you, as we do create and fix recipes for calibre, but it is almost like rocket for people not used to programming. And even for experienced people, it would be just a lot easier to be able to tune recipe with a list of checkboxes, than either
a) have recipe duplicated, altered by hand and stored in "custom" section

If we're going to expose variables, I wouldn't expose these by default. They interact with one another and aren't useful in many recipes. I'd let the recipe author decide what to expose. I've wanted to expose how many comics to retrieve in comics recipes. Changing those variables would have no effect on many recipes.

or
b) locate the zipped recipe bundle, unpack it, fix the recipe, and compress it back

This won't work. Calibre pulls the current recipe from online and only uses the local copy when it can't get the online version.

[robbw]

Originally Posted by t3d

But my idea was to optionally expose these variable on a "per recipe" basis, next to scheduling preferences.

Of course it is easy, both for me and you, as we do create and fix recipes for calibre, but it is almost like rocket for people not used to programming. And even for experienced people, it would be just a lot easier to be able to tune recipe with a list of checkboxes, than either
a) have recipe duplicated, altered by hand and stored in "custom" section
or
b) locate the zipped recipe bundle, unpack it, fix the recipe, and compress it back

I'm one of those people for whom this is rocket science. I'm interested in paring down the the recipes of the NYTimes, BBC news and Boston Globe. I don't want sports, style, films, and so forth, just the local, national and international news. Can someone point me to a resource that can get me started, or is this above my ability? The NYTimes recipe in particular, creates huge documents that hogs resources on my computer and K3. I don't need half of what the recipe contains.

Thanks in advance for helpful advice.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by robbw

I'm one of those people for whom this is rocket science. I'm interested in paring down the the recipes of the NYTimes ... The NYTimes recipe in particular, creates huge documents that hogs resources on my computer and K3. I don't need half of what the recipe contains.

Thanks in advance for helpful advice.

The NYTimes is typical of why his suggestion won't work without a huge effort to rewrite recipes and rewrite how the recipe system functions. There aren't any "feeds" in that recipe. That recipe scrapes a page with links to relevant articles to build its own "feeds". Simpler recipes just list the feeds and they're easy to modify. Recipes for sites that don't have feeds must build them from scratch.

However, recipe authors typically try to build some flexibility into their recipes. The NYT has this in it:

    description = 'Daily news from the New York Times (subscription version)'
    allSectionKeywords = ['The Front Page', 'International','National','Obituaries','Editorials',
                          'New York','Business Day','Science Times','Sports','Dining','Arts',
                          'Home','Styles','Sunday Business','Week In Review','Travel','Magazine',
                          'Book Review','Weddings','Real Estate','Automobiles',"T Men's Fashion",
                          "T Women's Fashion"]

    # List of sections to exclude
    # To add a section, copy the section name from the allSectionKeywords list above
    # For example, to exclude 'Dining' and 'Weddings':
    #excludeSectionKeywords = ['Dining','Weddings']
    excludeSectionKeywords = []

    # List of sections to include (test and debug only)
    # By default, any sections in today's paper that are not listed in excludeSectionKeywords
    # are downloaded.  fetch_only specifies that only certain sections are to be downloaded.
    # This should only be used for testing and debugging.
    # For example, to download only 'The Front Page' section:
    # fetch_only = set(['The Front Page'])
    fetch_only = set([])
    if fetch_only:
        excludeSectionKeywords = list(set(allSectionKeywords) ^ fetch_only)

    # one_picture_per_article specifies that calibre should only use the first image
    # from an article (if one exists).  If one_picture_per_article = True, the image
    # will be moved to a location between the headline and the byline.
    # If one_picture_per_article = False, all images from the article will be included
    # and shown in their original location.

Read here and here for how to open up a builtin recipe and modify it. Briefly: you click the triangle on the right side of the Fetch News icon, select the button to modify a builtin recipe, change it, then save it as a custom recipe. The custom recipe is then available for you to schedule in the usual way.

[robbw]

Starson17, that was really helpful. Thanks for taking the time to give me a simple but well-thought out reply. I appreciate your making it simple for me. I'll take a look at those links and see what I can make of the process. Who knows, I make even develop some new skills!

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by robbw

Starson17, that was really helpful. Thanks for taking the time to give me a simple but well-thought out reply. I appreciate your making it simple for me. I'll take a look at those links and see what I can make of the process. Who knows, I make even develop some new skills!

I'm glad it was helpful. The first link is to my sticky here, and if you find anything unclear there, let me know.